Acta Economica et Turistica (Jan 2020)
Personal Consumption Expenditures During the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Republic Of Croatia
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has left serious trails on people‘s both personal as well as business lives. Strict epidemiological measures, border shutdowns, prohibition of gatherings, partial or complete lockdown, the purpose of which is maintaining people‘s lives, has led to the economic activity decrease, and consequently to the downfall of universal basic income of the employed. The major objective of this study is to examine to which extent the COVID-19 pandemic has affected personal consumption expenditures, based on the research conducted on 106 respondents, who were asked about their standpoints and who were divided into groups, on the grounds of their monthly income. The first hypothesis has not been confirmed since 57.9% of the respondents have stated that they did not pay attention to the origin of the products they were buying, while 88.5% claimed they only bought Croatian products. The second hypothesis has been partially confirmed because there is a statistically significant difference in respondents‘ habits, taking into consideration that they were divided into different groups, based on their income level. This difference is evident in two categories, and these are food purchase and long-term stockpiling and online buying of products, like it was the case earlier. The third hypothesis, which says that personal consumption of particular product groups has increased as a consequence of COVID-19 pandemic, has not been confirmed since all respondents stated that they were consuming all products and services in the equal amount as they were in the period before the pandemic, with the exception of spending money on restaurants and hotels. At the beginning of the second pandemic wave, some countries are pursuing a partial lockdown in order to preserve lives, promoting work from home and hence, maintaining enterprise business, citizens‘ income and consequently personal consumption expenditure.
